ABSTRACT
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) is probably Italy's major intellectual of the twentieth century. Pasolini's advocacy of, and attachment to, homosexuality was of a quite particular and limited kind. It excluded most of those whom we might to-day call gay and largely celebrated with nostalgia fleeting encounters between allegedly heterosexual youths of the working or peasant class and an older more sophisticated middle class homosexual. This chapter begins by looking at three critiques of Pasolini by major gay/queer critics who to varying degrees find themselves at odds with his work, and by extension, at odds with him. Richard Dyer's article Pasolini and Homosexuality' published in the UK in 1977 very clearly bears the imprint of the Gay Liberation Movement of that period. The gay historian, Giovanni Dall'Orto's polemical essay 'Contro Pasolini' was published in 1990 as the concluding piece to a pioneering collection that looked specifically at representations of homosexuality in Pasolini's work.
